Gordon Prize in Managing Cybersecurity Resources Awarded to Melissa Vice

The University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business has announced the recipient of the 2010 Gordon Prize in Managing Cybersecurity Resources, an essay contest that had competitors offering innovative solutions for how to allocate resources to protect personal and sensitive data on computers and online. Melissa S. Vice won the award for her essay, “The Threat from Within: A Social Engineering Plan to Combat Cybersecurity Data Breaches.” The competition and prize are named for pioneering cybersecurity expert Lawrence A. Gordon, the Smith School’s Ernst & Young Alumni Professor of Managerial Accounting and Information Assurance.

Vice is an information technology and security professional with the Center for Development of Security Excellence at the Defense Security Service, a U.S. Department of Defense agency. In her winning essay, she underscores a contemporary issue regarding the insider threat to cybersecurity. She proposes a clear framework using social engineering to alleviate the insider threat problem.

This was the second year for the annual Gordon Prize competition, which is open to students, faculty, and information security professionals in both the public and private sectors. Essays are evaluated on their ability to provide and describe a clear, innovative solution to the problems associated with managing cybersecurity resources.

Gordon is committed to raising awareness of the issue of cybersecurity and its importance to business and government leaders. In 2003 he and two colleagues at the University of Maryland instituted the Smith School’s annual Cybersecurity Forum, which just marked its seventh year, to bring together the rich interchange of ideas that can only occur when people from many academic backgrounds and industries gather. He sees the Gordon Prize as another way of encouraging practitioners and theoreticians alike to approach the problem of cybersecurity in a multidisciplinary way.